Three Sisters Were Presented for the Duke to Marry — He Chose the Quiet Woman Pouring the Tea

Chapter 6

She had five minutes, she judged, before the bell for the children’s hour, and she spent them the way she spent everything: by counting.

If she burned the inner note, nothing would change. She would go on. In three weeks or a month, when it became plain to Cosima that the Duke did not mean to offer for Priscilla, her aunt would turn her rage inward on the household, and Diana would take the brunt of it all summer. She had taken worse summers. She could take another. There would be no note, no risk, no door.

If she went into the garden at ten with the spaniel and a book, she would speak to the Duke of Ravensgate. And when Cosima discovered it — and Cosima would discover it, Cosima discovered everything, Cosima was a woman who had built her whole life around the principle that small things go unobserved and had never once been caught by it herself — she would be turned out of the house within the day. No reference. No character. And as for the money, the hundred and eighty pounds a year: it existed. Diana had held the copy of the clause in her hands. But a copy is not an original, and a girl with a copy and no witnesses and no solicitor and no friend above the rank of housekeeper was not a person the world was in the habit of believing.

She thought very clearly, then, about what she had actually been waiting for all these seven years.

She had told herself she was waiting for her aunt to die, and then for a friend, and then for a place. She had never once let herself look all the way down the line of the waiting — because all the way down the line there had been one shape, small and folded like a note passed in a corridor, and the shape was this: that someday, somehow, someone with standing would ask her a question, and she would be able to answer it with the truth.

That was all. That was everything. She had been keeping herself alive for the chance to say one true sentence out loud.

She put the outer note in the sewing basket by the window, where her aunt would find it later and think herself clever for having found it. She put the inner note into the little schoolroom fire and watched it go — the curl of the paper, the brief orange writing of the flame along the fold, the black thread of ash. She had the oddest feeling, watching it, that she was burning the safe version of herself: the girl who had waited, the girl who had poured, the girl who had gone quietly on.

She was not that girl any more, and she had not even left the room.

At noon she went down and found Cosima in the morning room over the tradesmen’s books, and said, in her plain voice, that she meant to take the spaniel into the garden in the mornings for exercise, if her aunt permitted — the dog was fat, and the groom said it wanted walking.

Cosima did not look up from her writing. She said, without warmth, that Diana might.

It was, Diana thought afterwards, the cheapest permission of her life, and it cost her aunt the most, and neither of them knew it yet.

The next morning at ten, Diana Cranidge went out of the house by the garden door with the spaniel, Nell, trotting ahead on her short legs, and under her arm the small volume of Ovid — her father’s book, the smallest of the three, the one with a folded paper hidden inside its cover that she had never shown to anyone living.

She had not changed her gown. She had not pinned her hair another way, or pinched her cheeks, or done any of the hundred arts she had watched three cousins deploy across six seasons. She had thought about it, and she had decided, in the clear cold way she decided things: if the Duke of Ravensgate wished to speak with her, he would speak to the person she was. She had no energy left, and, in her own stubborn way, too much pride, to manufacture a woman for him to meet.

The garden was long and narrow, walled in London brick, and the roses her aunt spoke of were two seasons off doing anything worth speaking of. At the far end, by the small brick wall where the roses did not do well, a man stood with his hands behind his back, in a plain dark coat, no hat. He was looking at the wall as though he were reading it.

He did not turn when she came. He said, “Miss Cranidge.”

She said, “Your grace.”

“Will you walk?”

“I have five minutes.”

“Then we will walk five minutes.”

He put himself on her right, at the correct polite distance — she noticed that, the correctness of it, the way she noticed everything — and the spaniel went ahead of them, nose down, snuffling at the wall as though the whole mystery of the universe were buried under the lavender.

He said, very quietly, “I have asked to speak with you plainly. Is that agreeable?”

“Yes.”

“I know that you keep the accounts in that house,” he said. “I know that you have taught the youngest sister her Latin, and that you were not permitted to sit at the tea. I know also that I have no right to ask you any question I am about to ask. If you are willing to answer, I would be grateful.”

She looked at her hands on the little book. She said, “Ask.”

“Are you kept in that house against your will?”

She thought a long moment. Not about the answer — she had known the answer for seven years — but about whether this man, this dark, tired, thorough man who walked at exactly the correct distance, was owed it.

“No,” she said at last.

He nodded once, and said nothing, and they walked, and then she said the harder thing, because if she was going to answer one question she was going to answer it all the way.

“I stay because I have nowhere better to go. And because my aunt holds papers that belong to me, which I cannot get out of her hands without a solicitor.”

He did not turn his head. He kept walking at her pace. “What papers?”

“My mother’s marriage settlement. There is a small annuity in it. One hundred and eighty pounds a year. It is mine, drawn on a trust in Chancery Lane. My aunt has been collecting it for seven years as the expenses of keeping me, and has never given me one shilling of it. She has the original. I have a copy of the crucial clause — my father’s clerk made it the week before he died — but it is only a copy. And I have never told a living soul, your grace, until this moment.”

He walked another dozen paces before he spoke, and the spaniel came back and looked up at the two of them, waiting to see what sort of walk this was going to be.

“That is a serious thing to say, Miss Cranidge.”

“I know it. It is why I have never said it.”

“Do you say it to me because you wish me to act on it?”

She stopped walking. The dog stopped too.

“I do not know why I say it to you,” she said. “I have said it to no one for seven years. Perhaps I am tired. Perhaps you are simply the first person who has asked.”

He was quiet a long moment, and the garden was just a London garden in the morning — soot on the brick, gulls somewhere over the river, the far clatter of a coal cart — and then he said, “May I do something with what you have told me?”

“I would rather you did not tell my aunt.”

“I will not tell your aunt. I will tell my mother. My mother has a solicitor — a very good one. And with your permission I would like to place him at your disposal, quietly, at no cost to you. He will do nothing without your word.”

Diana looked at him for the first time. Straight on, without the curtsy, without the veil of seven years.

His dark eyes were not cold. They were tired in exactly the way she was tired, which is a kind of family, and steady, and he was not smiling, and his face said, without any of the usual machinery of a gentleman’s face: I mean this.

“You may,” she said quietly.

He nodded once. “Thank you.”

“Your grace, may I ask you a question?”

“Please.”

“Why did you come today?”

He looked again at the wall — at the poor roses, at the brick, at whatever it was he had been reading there — and he said at last, “Because I have called at a great many houses this season, and yours is the first in which I have seen a person I would trust to keep me sane.”

She looked at him. “That is not a small thing to say.”

“It is not a small thing to mean.”

“You do not know me.”

“No,” he said. “I know a hand in a household ledger — small, and even, and honest. I know a girl who taught her sister the fourth book of the Aeneid in a schoolroom and could not be paid for it and said nothing. I know a woman who took a pinch in her aunt’s drawing room and never made a sound.” His voice went briefly very quiet. “It is enough to know that I would like to know more.”

Diana looked back toward the house. A curtain moved at the drawing-room window — or the light did. She said, “You have very little time before my aunt sees you from that window, and then the whole of this is finished before it has begun. So let me answer before she does. If you wish to see me again, you must contrive it. I have no drawing room, your grace. I have no receiving day. I have nothing in the world to receive anyone in.”

He said, “I can contrive.”

She was quiet a moment. She had never in her life been asked such a question. She had not, seven years ago in a cold bedroom at the top of that house, expected ever to be asked one.

“Then yes,” she said.

She said it plainly, and exactly once, and turned, because Nell was pulling toward the house, and she did not curtsy, because she was walking, and she went back up the path with her book and her plain brown gown and the dog trotting a step ahead of her, and did not look back.

The Duke of Ravensgate stood at the end of the path where the roses did not do well, and watched her go.

He was not a young fool. He knew quite clearly that he had just done a thing men of his rank are not supposed to do: committed himself, silently, on a Tuesday morning, to a course of action that would end — he already knew it would end; he had known since a drawing room three weeks ago — in a marriage with the one woman in London his mother’s own second cousin had been at some pains to hide from him.

He knew Cosima Marbrey would fight him for it. He knew he would win.

He did not yet know what the winning would cost the woman with the small book.